Kira Disapproves

Thanks to everyone who responded to my book post! You’ve provided me with a challenge and hopefully I can find some books that will surprise you and provide you with a night or two of flashlight-under-the-covers reading.

My first “Book Finder” response will be posted within the next week. Until then, I’d like to recommend a book that you can seek out while you wait. I’ll be interested to hear in the comments whether it’s a discovery, or whether you’ve read this book before.

The book is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl.  Most people are probably familiar with Dahl from some of his more famous titles, especially the ones that have been made into movies. There’s Matilda, about a little girl whose untapped intelligence leads her to develop telekinesis and other magical powers. The Witches is about a boy who  stumbles upon the annual conference of a group of witches who hate children while on vacation with his Grandmother at a seaside resort. One of Dahl’s somewhat lesser-known titles, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, just received the silver-screen treatment in an animated movie with George Clooney.

The list of great books goes on and on, and hopefully you’ve read some of them. But if you’ve enjoyed Dahl before and you haven’t read Henry Sugar, to read it now will be like discovering an entire extra Dahl novel written just for you. While Henry Sugar is really a collection of both short stories and prose — including a short, autobiographical essay that was the first thing about his experiences in World War II that was the first thing Dahl ever wrote — the novella from which the book takes it name has all the scope, strangeness and pit-of-the-stomach joy of the best full-length Dahl novel.

The novel is a story-within-a-story (within-a-story) about a rich, callous young man named Henry Sugar who discovers the secret journal of another man who learns to see while blindfolded.The journal includes a kind of how-to manual on obtaining the seemingly magical ability, and Henry starts applying himself to something serious for the first time in his life when he sets out to gain the same ability. Of course, his motives are less spiritual than financial. He figures he can make a lot of money and gain a lot of power if he can, for example, see through walls.

There are obstacles along the way, and the closer Henry comes to mastering his new talent, the more trouble he encounters. I don’t really want to say anymore, because the interesting part of the story is more how its told than what exactly happens and I don’t want to give too much away. Henry’s character arc leads to some unexpected places, and I’m still surprised that no one has made a movie of this story. It has at least as much content as the short story that the movie “The Illusionist” was based on (I liked both the movie and the story, it just strikes me as a good comparison in terms of how much the story provides that could be elaborated on.)

Anyways, maybe the problem is that not enough people know about it. Now you do. Go read it. And check out the other short pieces in the book while you’re at it.

More book ideas to come…

The “other” bookshelf. This is a slightly old picture, so if you really paid attention to the new shelf, you may see some duplicate titles. Also, Lila put herself in this picture. She couldn’t figure out why the camera wasn’t pointed at her in the first place.

New Bookshelf. And that’s the Olympics on T.V.!

I strongly believe that everyone should have the experience of books that sneak up on them like magic. Loving books can feel lonely sometimes. Not every book is Harry Potter and not everyone understands when you need a week to recover after reading Ender’s Game for the fourth time or what it’s like after discovering Gone with the Wind at fourteen and feeling each of Scarlett’s losses like a physical blow.

One of the best ways to discover books is, of course, the library. I found The Secret Garden at a library and I felt like I was the first person to ever read it. I also spent several months when I was about seven re-typing it painstakingly into the computer, because I wanted to write something just as wonderful.

I got a new bookshelf this weekend because the built-ins were overflowing, and then my overflow bookshelf was overflowing, and then I had moved — seemingly all of the sudden — to a book-organizing system that involved piles of books stacked on my bedroom floor by subject. My roommate, Bonnie, and I purchased a flat screen digital T.V. last week so we could get the new digital T.V. signals and mounting it on the wall allowed us to get rid of the T.V. stand and put a bookshelf in its place.

Organizing the books (by color, as you may or may not have noticed in the picture) got me thinking about the problem of giving books away.

I can’t do it.

The only time I feel good about it is when the book is one I really love and I know the person receiving it will love it as well. For example, I no longer have my orange, hardcover copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8 because I gave it away to one of the little kids who was in “Annie Get Your Gun” with me last Fall. She had cut her hair in a short, pixie cut for her role as an orphan in “Oliver” a few months earlier, and she looked exactly like Ramona.

I brought the book to rehearsal with me one night and showed it to her, and she stared for a few minutes at the line drawing of a pixie-ish little girl on the cover and said “Yeah, that does look like me!” I had intended to simply lend her the book, but she kept forgetting to bring it back and I told her not to worry. Go ahead and keep it. She gave me a big hug and ran off to be charmingly troublesome backstage, just like Ramona would have.

So. My new bookshelf has inspired me to do some virtual Ramona-type lending. I want to help you discover books that you haven’t read before, but that you will recognize, just like Katherine recognized herself in Ramona. In the comments, post a favorite book of yours. It doesn’t have to be children’s/Y.A. In return, I’ll do a blog post in the coming weeks that talks about a children’s or Y.A. book I think you might like to discover based on what you’ve already read (children’s/Y.A. because it’s my specialty and my favorite thing to read and to write.)

For the first three commenters, I’ll even mail you a copy of the book.

The obvious problem is that you may have already read what I recommend, but I’m hoping that I can get around that with some obscure choices and some pointed questions to commenters (all of whom I expect I will know.)

You may not love the book, but hopefully you’ll love the feeling of knowing that a book was chosen just for you. For readers, I think there’s something special about the books that find us, instead of the other way around.

Also. Today is Lila’s 2nd birthday.

I just started re-reading The Trespassers by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. She’s a YA author who also wrote the Newberry Honor books The Egypt Game and The Headless Cupid. This one is also a YA book, and I’m pretty sure I bought it from a Scholastic book order back in the day. I think this is probably the case because I don’t own any of her other books, and if I had bought one of her books in a bookstore, it probably wouldn’t have been this one.

The point is, I own it, and because I own it, I’ve probably read it at least three or four times. I like to re-read stuff, especially YA stuff, because you notice different things each time. Also, Snyder writes the kind of books that I can fall into, so I always read it so quickly, that going back to it, the ending is fuzzy all over again and it only falls into place as I re-read it and the bits and pieces of the story that I responded to most strongly before remind me of the rest of it. It’s a different thing than just reading a story and learning what it’s about the first time, if that makes sense.

Here’s the first paragraph (I’ve only read the first chapter as I write this.)

Toward the end of Cornelia Bradford’s sixth-grade year at Carmel Middle School she wrote a very successful report for Mr. Hardcastle’s Language Arts class. Mr. Hardcastle liked it a lot. When she got it back, it had a large, red A at the top of the page. And beneath that the words “Good for you, Neely. Well written and fascinating material. Particularly fascinating to me, and to everyone in my core class this year.” The title of the paper was “The Tragic Story of Halcyon House.”

Anyways, the story is about two kids, a brother and sister, named Cornelia and Gregory. The kids go by “Neely” and “Grub,” respectively, and Neely is older. Somehow (I can’t remember how yet because I’m only on the first chapter) the kids find a way to sneak in to an old, abandoned mansion in their neighborhood. The mansion still has lots of stuff in it, and the kids find that it is a great place to play, even if it does seem a little haunted and even if the stories about why it’s abandoned are vague and varied, with a hint of scandal. Actually, that probably makes it more fun.

Through a series of events, the kids are discovered in the house when the family that owns it — the ancestors of the guy who built it — move back in. The family’s only child, a son, Curtis, is the one who discovers them, and Neely strikes up a kind of friendship with Curtis that is mostly perpetuated by the fact that she and her brother still want access to the house. As I remember it, it isn’t that Neely doesn’t want to be nice to Curtis, but Curtis is a difficult kid to like — domineering, threatening and petty when he doesn’t get his way.

I’m not sure exactly how it all plays out, but some pretty bad stuff happens and Curtis eventually leaves town again, with only Neely really understanding all the secrets that surrounded his family’s abandonment of the house, then and now. I’m looking forward to finding out the rest of it.

The real reason I wrote this post is, it wasn’t until I read that first paragraph just now that I really read the word “halcyon” correctly for the first time. (See the correct stress and hear it at this link to Dictionary.com.) Until I read it tonight, I had always pronounced the word to myself, and possibly said it out loud, as Hal-ick-con. I mixed up the “c” and the “y” consistently, every time I read it, my whole life. I wondered if it may even have started when I read this book, because I think my pronuncioation has a nicer cadence when paired with the word “house” than the real one.

So I was wrong, and I only now know it. And that makes me sad. I guess that sounds a little overdramatic, but I have this whole part of my little world that was built up by the relationship I have with the things I read when I was a kid. And having even one little piece of it all the sudden turn in to something else is really weird and disconcerting. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The plus side is, I can now use the word “halcyon” in conversation without mispronouncing it. (Assuming it ever comes up. It isn’t applicable to much I can think of in my life just now.)

Thinking about it some more, I realized that I DID look up that word for the first time when I read this book. I remember that I was reading it before falling asleep, and for some reason I was sleeping in my little brother’s room. I’m guessing that this might have been right after he got a new bed, a waterbed, of which I was extremely jealous. To get me to shut up about how unfair it was, my parents probably negotiatied with him to switch rooms with me for a few nights at some point. So there I was, sleeping in the water bed, with my brother’s faded, blue football-themed comforter, and I distinctly remember looking at the temperature gauge at the end of the bed and seeing that it was made by a company called “Halcyon.”

It was the very day that I must have learned what the word meant (but not how to pronounce it) and I had just finished reading a book that was about how calling something that name didn’t guarantee things would be perfect, and how it could even mean that things went worse than anyone could have expected because the name made everyone less prepared. And I also remember how, back then, I had read somewhere about how water beds could kill people. It was very unlikely, but it could happen if the temperature gauge broke. The sleeping person could just lie there in the water, getting colder and colder, but not waking up and then eventually they wouldn’t be able to wake up at all and they would just die, frozen.

I kind of doubt that that could really happen. I don’t know where the heck I read it. Maybe I was confusing it with the Rescue 911 episode where they resuscitate the little girl that falls asleep in a snow bank. Either way, I know it was real for me then. And now I have a reason for why, around the age of eight or nine, I sometimes snuck into Brian’s room if I woke up late at night, just to check that he was okay.

I don’t know if anyone cares about all those memories but me. But I’m still going to post them here so that I won’t forget again. So maybe next time I pick up this book and I’m not quite sure what happens, I’ll be able to look back and remember not just what the story is, but what the story is for me.

Now, on to Chapter Two…